THEATER REVIEW; Standing In for New Yorkers: Expressions of Grief Over Sept. 11

Ripped-from-the-headlines drama is generally the province of television, not the stage. But Sept. 11 was no ordinary headline, and ''The Guys'' is not an ordinary night in the theater. It is a two-handed play about a fire captain who lost eight men in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and an editor, a woman who helps him write the eulogies he must deliver. And though no one, I think, would describe it as an artful or literary piece (though it has its moments, believe me), it has the impact -- half-relieving, half-agonizing -- of a chill salve on an open wound.

The play was commissioned by Jim Simpson, the artistic director of the Flea Theater, a small but active company in Lower Manhattan whose existence was threatened by the disaster and its aftermath. The author is a woman he met at a dinner party, Anne Nelson, who was not an experienced playwright but a journalist turned professor, director of the international program at Columbia's journalism school.

Like the character in ''The Guys,'' Ms. Nelson had helped a firefighter prepare to speak publicly at the funerals of those who died on the day of the terrorist attack, and she agreed to try her hand at turning her experience into a play. It took her just nine post-midnight sessions to complete the script. And in defiance of the theater's tradition of long, slow development, by early December it was being performed in front of an audience by two movie stars, Sigourney Weaver (who is married to Mr. Simpson) and Bill Murray.

Ms. Nelson's script shows all the earmarks of a talented writer who is lacking in experience and who could certainly make use of time for a rewrite. In the first half-hour the play has some sensational passages; when the editor turns the first interview with the fire captain into a eulogy and has him read aloud what she's written, it is a moment that had me recalling Mozart's improvement on a Salieri composition in ''Amadeus.'' But the writing slides noticeably as the play proceeds, and the last couple of eulogies are considerably less inspiring.

In the intimate setting of the Flea with the black-box stage lighted in the fashion of a living room, the actors are still working with the scripts in front of them. Critics were invited to review the show only last week, an indication that it was not intended for an extended run until it proved its mettle as an audience pleaser, which it has.

The plan now is to extend the show at least until Feb. 9 and perhaps longer than that with revolving players in the manner of ''The Vagina Monologues.'' (Bill Irwin steps in for Mr. Murray beginning tomorrow night.) And one of the interesting things about ''The Guys'' will be to see how long the run continues; the potency is so tied to a historic moment that as the moment recedes, the pull on an audience may not be so magnetic.

For the time being, the pull is considerable for a number of reasons. One is that Ms. Nelson is obviously a thoughtful and feeling citizen of the sort that most New Yorkers would count themselves among. Joan, the editor, is clearly the author's stand-in and, as a result, ours, too; she is someone whose circumstances virtually everyone in the audience intimately understands.

The stunned grief; the persistent, baffling and frightening sense that we can no longer work, sleep, breathe or love other people in serene peace; and perhaps most of all the profound helplessness and irrelevance that those of us who merely witnessed the tragedy experienced: these are the emotions that Joan expresses.

But curiously they are not the emotions that drive the play. Because most of us have already felt with some intensity the things that Joan is feeling, there is a mundane quality, dramatically speaking, about her character. She has her moments of observant wit: '' 'Where were you Sept. 11?' Question of the year. I was at home, getting ready to go vote for Mark Green. How many times did I vote for Mark Green?''

But mostly she's indistinguishable from the kinds of New Yorkers who attend the theater, and she is occasionally overwrought in a way that most of us wouldn't dare to be out loud. ''New York,'' she laments, as the play begins. ''My beautiful, gleaming, wounded city.''

Ms. Weaver with her formidable good looks and erect carriage is a rather effective representative of us in our grief, exhibiting that the strain of the historic moment has effected a particular sort of distress on the class of citizens unused to feeling as though they don't matter.

Where Joan is more genuinely serviceable in standing in for the rest of us is in asking the questions that so few of us have had answered: what is the experience that we haven't had? How can we share the suffering of those whose suffering is personal and visceral?

As a result, the real achievement of Ms. Nelson's play is that in the character of Nick, the fire captain, it gives credible and powerful voice to a very specific kind of pain that we crave these days to understand but from the outside seems only blindingly enormous and beyond sharing.

Nick, a firefighter for 20 years, is sensible though not sophisticated, male in the old-fashioned sense (that is, chivalrous and not entirely unchauvinistic), decent, humble, proud and overwhelmed. And he is a fine dramatic character. Responding to Joan's questions, Nick reveals so many specifics about life in a firehouse -- the guys spend most of their time in the kitchen; they cook for one another, and the food is awful -- that the play becomes remarkably intimate. At times I had the sense that I was watching a documentary, following the random path of a hand-held camera and catching the humble details by accident.

We learn that for one young firefighter, still on probation (a probie, in firehouse vernacular), Sept. 11 was his first and last big fire. Another man was days away from his captain's exam. Another, who still lived with his parents and couldn't seem to find a girlfriend, was a metal worker who made useful tools for the firehouse.

Mr. Murray gives a determinedly low-key and deeply touching performance, even if a bit of his native Chicago creeps into the outer-borough accent he affects. Though he spends most of the play seated, he is acting with his entire body, down to the muscles of his face, and he shows us that Nick has a sense of humor and a joy in small pleasures that aren't entirely buried in grief.

Perhaps the keenest message to emerge from ''The Guys,'' however, is the assertion that writers -- and actors -- have a serious role to play in a grieving society. In Joan and Nick's partnership, what comes through is that humanity can be exalted by expression as well as the other way around.